On Beauty

by Zadie Smith

  Only when Jerome leaned his head on her shoulder did she realize that he too was crying.

  12

  The next day was the first day of spring. There had been blossom before today, and the snow had already departed, but it was this new morning that broadcast a blue sky to every soul on the East Coast, this day that brought with it a sun that spoke not simply of light but of heat. The first Zora knew of it was in slices – her mother twisting open the Venetian blinds.

  ‘Baby, you got to wake up. Sorry, honey. Honey?’

  Zora opened her other eye and found her mother sitting on her bed.

  ‘The college just called me. Something’s happened – they want to see you. Jack French’s office. They sounded pretty het up. Zora?’

  ‘It’s a Saturday . . .’

  ‘They wouldn’t tell me anything. They said it was urgent. Are you in trouble?’

  Zora sat up in bed. Her hangover had vanished. ‘Where’s Howard?’ she asked. She could not remember ever feeling as focused as she did this morning. The first day she wore glasses had been a little like this: lines sharper, colours clearer. The whole world like an old painting restored. Finally, she understood.

  ‘Howard? The Greenman. He walked in ’cos the weather’s nice. Zoor, do you want me to come with you?’

  Zora declined this offer. For the first time in months, she got dressed without attention to anything else except the basic practical covering of her body. She didn’t do her hair. No make-up. No contact lenses. No heels. How much time she saved! How much more she would get done in this new life! She got into the Belsey family car and drove with hostile speed into town, cutting up other cars and swearing at innocent traffic signals. She parked illegally in a faculty space. It being a weekend, the department doors were locked. Liddy Cantalino buzzed her in.

  ‘Jack French?’ demanded Zora.

  ‘And good morning to you too, young lady,’ Liddy snapped back. ‘They’re all in his office.’

  ‘All? Who?’

  ‘Zora, dear, why don’t you go on in there and see for yourself?’

  For the very first time in a faculty building, Zora walked in without knocking. She was confronted with a bizarre composition of people: Jack French, Monty Kipps, Claire Malcolm and Erskine Jegede. All had taken up different poses of anxiety. Nobody was sitting, not even Jack.

  ‘Ah, Zora – come in,’ said Jack. Zora joined the standing party. She had no idea what it was all about, but she was not in any way nervous. She was still flying on fury, capable of anything.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘I’m extremely sorry for dragging you out this morning,’ said Jack, ‘but it is an urgent matter and I did not feel it could wait until the end of spring break . . .’ Here Monty snorted derisively. ‘Or indeed even until Monday.’

  ‘What’s going on?’ repeated Zora.

  ‘Well,’ said Jack, ‘it seems that last night, after everybody had left for the evening – at about 10 p.m. we think, although we’re looking at the possibility that one of our own cleaners was still here at a later point and did, in some capacity, aid whoever it was who – ’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Jack!’ cried Claire Malcolm. ‘I’m sorry – but Jesus Christ – let’s not spend all day here – I, for one, would like to get back to my holiday – Zora, do you know where Carl Thomas is?’

  ‘Carl? No – why? What’s happened?’

  Erskine, tired of having to pretend he was more panicked than he was, took a seat. ‘A painting,’ he explained, ‘was stolen from the Black Studies Department last night. A very valuable painting belonging to Professor Kipps.’

  ‘I find out only now,’ said Monty, his voice twice as loud as everybody else’s, ‘that one of the street-children of Dr Malcolm’s collection has been working three doors away from me for a month, a young man who evidently –’

  ‘Jack, I am not,’ said Claire, as Erskine covered his eyes with his hand, ‘going to stand around being insulted by this man. I’m just not going to do it.’

  ‘A young man,’ bellowed Monty, ‘who works here without references, without qualifications, without anybody knowing anything whatsoever about him – never in my long academic life have I EVER experienced anything as incompetent, as slap-dash, as –’

  ‘How do you know that this young man is responsible? What evidence do you have?’ barked Claire, but seemed terrified of hearing the answer.

  ‘Now, please, please,’ said Jack, gesturing towards Zora. ‘We have a student here. Please. Surely it behoves us to . . .’ But Jack wisely thought better of this digression and returned to his main theme. ‘Zora – Dr Malcolm and Dr Jegede have explained to us that you are close to this young man. Did you happen to see him yesterday evening?’

  ‘Yes. He was at a party I was at.’

  ‘Ah, good. And did you happen to notice what time he left?’

  ‘We had a . . . we kind of argued and we both . . . we both left quite early – separately. We left separately.’

  ‘At what time?’ asked Monty in the voice of God. ‘At what time did the boy leave?’

  ‘Early. I’m not sure.’ Zora blinked twice. ‘Maybe nine thirty?’

  ‘And was this party far from here?’ asked Erskine.

  ‘No, ten minutes.’

  Now Jack sat down. ‘Thank you, Zora. And you have no idea where he is now?’

  ‘No, sir, I don’t.’

  ‘Thank you. Liddy will let you out.’

  Monty banged Jack French’s desk with his fist. ‘Now one minute please!’ he boomed. ‘Is that all you intend to ask her? Excuse me, Miss Belsey – before you cease to grace us with your presence could you tell me what kind of young man – in your estimation – is this Carl Thomas? Did he strike you, for example, as a thief?’

  ‘Oh, my God!’ complained Claire. ‘This is really repulsive. I don’t want any part of this.’

  Monty glared at her. ‘A court might find you party to this matter whether you liked it or not, Dr Malcolm.’

  ‘Are you threatening me?’

  Monty put his back to Claire. ‘Zora, could you answer my question, please? Would it be an unfair description to describe this young man as from the “wrong side of the tracks”? Are we likely to find a criminal record?’

  Zora ignored Claire Malcolm’s attempt to catch her eye.

  ‘If you mean, is he a kid from the streets, well, obviously he is – he’d tell you that himself. He’s mentioned being in . . . like, trouble before, sure. But I don’t really know the details.’

  ‘We will find out the details, soon enough, I’m sure,’ said Monty.

  ‘You know,’ said Zora evenly, ‘if you really want to find him you should probably ask your daughter. I hear they’re spending a lot of quality time together. Can I go now?’ she asked Jack, as Monty steadied himself with a hand to the desk.

  ‘Liddy will let you out,’ repeated Jack faintly.

  An (almost) empty house. A bright spring day. Birdsong. Squirrels. All the curtains and blinds open except in Jerome’s room, where a beast with a hangover remains under his comforter. Afresh, afresh, afresh! Kiki did not consciously begin a spring clean. She merely thought: Jerome is here, and in the storeroom beneath our lovely home boxes and boxes of Jerome’s things lie, awaiting the decision to be kept or destroyed. And so she would go through all of these things, the letters, the childhood report cards, the photo albums, the diaries, the home-made birthday cards, and she would say to him: Jerome, here is your past. It is not for me, your mother, to destroy your past. Only you can decide what must go and what must stay. But please, for the love of God, throw away something so I can free up some space in the storeroom for Levi’s crap.

  She put on her oldest track pants and tied a bandanna round her head. She went into the storeroom, taking nothing but a radio for company. It was a chaos of Belsey memories down here. Just to get in the door Kiki had to clamber over four massive plastic tubs that she knew to be full of nothing but photographs. It would be easy to
panic when confronted with such a mass of the past, but Kiki was a professional. Many years ago she had loosely divided this space into sections that corresponded with each of her three children. Zora’s section, at the back, was the largest, simply because it was Zora who had put more words on paper than anyone else, who had joined more teams and societies, garnered more certificates, won more cups. But nor was Jerome’s space inconsiderable. In there were all the things Jerome had collected and loved over the years, from fossils to copies of Time to autograph books to an assortment of Buddhas to decorated china eggs. Kiki sat legs crossed among all this and got to work. She separated physical things from paper things, childhood things from college things. Generally she kept her head down, but on the occasions she raised it she was treated to the most intimate of panoramic views: the scattered possessions of the three people she had created. Several small items made her cry: a tiny woollen bootie, a broken orthodontic retainer, a woggle from a cub-scout tie. She had not become Malcolm X’s private secretary. She never did direct a movie or run for the Senate. She could not fly a plane. But here was all this.

  Two hours later, Kiki lifted a box of sorted Jerome papers and carried it into the hallway. All these journals and notes and stories he had written before he was sixteen! She admired the weight of it in her arms. In her head she was making another speech to the Black American Mother’s Guild: Well, you just have to offer them encouragement and the correct role models, and you have to pass on the idea of entitlement. Both my sons feel entitled, and that’s why they achieve. Kiki accepted her applause from the assembly and went back into the clutter to retrieve two bags of Jerome’s pre-growth-spurt clothes. She carried these sacks of the past on her back, one over each shoulder. Last year, she had not thought she would still be in this house, in this marriage, come spring. But here she was, here she was. A tear in the garbage bag freed three pairs of pants and a sweater. Kiki crouched to pick these up and, as she did so, the second bag split too. She had packed them too heavy. The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free.

  Lunchtime came round. Kiki was too involved in her work to stop. And while the radio jocks pushed the country to extremity and the voices of white housewives encouraged her to take advantage of the spring sales, Kiki made a pile of all the photographic negatives she could find. They were everywhere. At first she held each one up to the light and tried to decode the inverted brown shadows of ancient beach holidays and European landscapes. But there were too many. The truth was, nobody would ever reprint them or look at them again. That didn’t mean you threw them away. This was why you freed up floor space – to make room for oblivion.

  ‘Hey, Mom,’ said Jerome sleepily, poking his head round the doorframe. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘You. You’re going out, buddy. That’s your stuff in the hallway – I’m trying to free up some space, so I can put some of the crap from Levi’s room in here.’

  Jerome rubbed his eyes. ‘I see,’ he said. ‘Out with the old, in with the new.’

  Kiki laughed. ‘Something like that. How are you?’

  ‘Hung over.’

  Kiki tutted chidingly. ‘You shouldn’t have taken the car, you know.’

  ‘Yeah, I know . . .’

  Kiki stuck her arm into a deep box and pulled out a little painted half-mask, the kind you would wear to a masquerade ball. She smiled at it fondly and turned it over. Some of the glitter around the eyes came off in her hands. ‘Venice,’ she said.

  Jerome nodded quickly. ‘That time we went?’

  ‘Hmm? Oh, no, before then. Before any of you were born.’

  ‘Some kind of romantic holiday,’ said Jerome. He tightened his tense grasp on the edge of the door.

  ‘The most romantic.’ Kiki smiled and shook her head free of some secret thought. She put the porcelain mask carefully to one side. Jerome took a step into the storeroom.

  ‘Mom . . .’

  Kiki smiled again, her face upturned to listen to her son. Jerome looked away.

  ‘You . . . you need some help, Mom?’

  Kiki kissed him gratefully.

  ‘Thanks, honey. That’d be so great. Come and help me move some stuff out of Levi’s. It’s a nightmare in there. I can’t face it alone.’

  Jerome put his hands out for Kiki and lifted her up. Together they crossed the hall and pushed Levi’s door open, working against the piles of clothes on its other side. Inside Levi’s room the smell of boy, of socks and sperm, was strong.

  ‘Nice wallpaper,’ said Jerome. The room was newly plastered with posters of black girls, mostly big black girls, mostly big black girls’ butts. Interspersed with these here and there were a few vainglorious portraits of rappers, mostly dead, and a massive photograph of Pacino in Scarface. But big black girls in bikinis was the central decorating scheme.

  ‘At least they’re not starving half to death,’ said Kiki, getting down on her knees to look under the bed. ‘At least they’ve got some flesh on their bones. OK – there’s all kinds of crap under here. You take that end and lift.’

  Jerome hiked up his end of the bed.

  ‘Higher,’ requested Kiki and Jerome obliged. Suddenly Kiki’s right knee slipped and her hand went to the floor. ‘Oh, my God,’ she whispered.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh, my God.’

  ‘What? Is it porn? My arm’s getting tired.’ Jerome lowered the bed a little.

  ‘DON’T MOVE!’ screamed Kiki.

  Jerome, terrified, lifted the bed high. His mother was gasping, like she was having some kind of a fit.

  ‘Mom – what? You’re scaring me, man. What is it?’

  ‘I don’t understand this. I DON’T UNDERSTAND THIS.’

  ‘Mom, I can’t hold this any longer.’

  ‘HOLD IT.’

  Jerome saw his mother get a grip on the sides of something. She slowly began to pull out whatever it was from under the bed.

  ‘What the . . . ?’ said Jerome.

  Kiki dragged the painting into the middle of the floor and sat next to it, hyperventilating. Jerome came up behind her and tried to touch her to calm her, but she slapped his hand away.

  ‘Mom, I don’t understand what’s going on. What is that?’

  Then came the sound of the front door clicking and opening. Kiki leaped to her feet and left the room, leaving Jerome to stare at the naked brown woman surrounded by her Technicolor flowers and fruit. He heard screaming and yelling from upstairs.

  ‘OH, REALLY – OH, REALLY – NOTHING GOING ON!’

  ‘LET GO OF ME!’

  They were coming down the stairs, Kiki and Levi. Jerome went to the door and saw Kiki smack Levi round the head harder than he’d ever seen.

  ‘Get in there! Get your ass in there!’

  Levi fell into Jerome and then both of them almost fell on to the painting. Jerome steadied himself and pulled Levi aside.

  Levi stood dumbfounded. Even his powers of rhetoric could not obscure the evidence of a five-foot oil painting hidden underneath his own bed.

  ‘Oh, shit, man,’ he said simply.

  ‘WHERE DID THIS COME FROM?’

  ‘Mom,’ tried Jerome quietly, ‘you need to calm down.’

  ‘Levi,’ said Kiki, and both boys recognized her coming on ‘all Florida’, which was the same thing, in Kiki terms, as ‘going postal’, ‘you’d better open your mouth with some kind of explanation or I am gonna strike you down where you stand, as God is my witness, I will wear your ass out today.’

  ‘Oh shit.’

  They heard the front door open and slam again. Levi looked in that direction hopefully, as if some intervention from upstairs might save him, but Kiki ignored it, yanking him by his sweatshirt to face her. ‘Because I know no son of mine steals ANYTHING – no child I ever raised took it into his head to steal ANYTHING FROM ANYBODY. Levi, you better open your mouth!’

  ‘We didn’t steal it!’ managed Levi. ‘I mean, we took it, but it ain’t stealing.’

  ‘We?’

 
‘This guy and me, this . . . guy.’

  ‘Levi, give me his name before I break your neck. I am not playing with you today, young man. There ain’t no games here today.’

  Levi squirmed. From upstairs came the noise of shouting.

  ‘What’s . . . ?’ he said, but that was never going to work.

  ‘Never mind what’s going on up there – you better start worrying about what’s going on down here. Levi, tell me the name of this man now.’

  ‘Man . . . it’s like . . . I can’t do that. He’s a guy . . . and he’s a Haitian guy and –’ Levi took a breath and began to speak extremely quickly. ‘Trust me, you don’t even understand, it’s like – OK, so, this painting is stolen anyway. It don’t even belong to that guy Kipps, not really – it was like twenty years ago and he just went to Haiti and got all these paintings by lying to poor people and buying them for a few dollars and now they be worth all this money and it ain’t his money and we’re just trying to –’

  Kiki pushed Levi hard in the chest. ‘You stole this from Mr Kipps’s office because some guy told you a lot of bullshit? Because some brother spun you a load of conspiracy bullshit? Are you an idiot?’

  ‘No! I’m not an idiot – and it’s not bullshit! You don’t know anything about it!’

  ‘Of course it’s bullshit – I happen to know this painting, Levi. It belonged to Mrs Kipps. And she bought it herself, before she was even married.’

  This silenced Levi.

  ‘Oh, Levi,’ said Jerome.

  ‘And that isn’t even the point, the point is you stole. You just believed anything these people say. You just gonna believe them all the way to jail. Just want to be cool, show you the big man around a load of no-good Negroes who don’t even –’

  ‘IT AIN’T LIKE THAT!’

  ‘That’s exactly what it’s like. It’s those guys you been spending all your time with – you can’t lie to me. I am so angry at you right now. I am so MAD right now! Levi – I’m trying to understand what you think you’ve achieved by stealing somebody’s property. Why would you do this?’